Who is CSR for in employer branding? Insights on employer branding strategies across industries, educational backgrounds and career styles

Since recruiting high-potential employees is essential to be innovative and sustainable, scholars and practitioners advocate using attributes of general interest for employer branding. Through two empirical studies, this research investigates to what extent employer branding strategies can rely only on sustainability-related attributes to win the war for talent. Study 1 compares the effects of (corporate social responsibility) CSR and other sustainability-related symbolic attributes (namely originality and resilience) on applicants across different educational backgrounds. The results reveal that the applicants' attitudes towards these attributes vary across their social identities, especially concerning the search for employer originality, which is a proxy of organisational innovativeness. Study 2 focuses on how personal identities shape the reactions to different career growth opportunities. The experiment on engineering graduates reveals that those applicants aiming to advance their career faster (boundaryless) find advancement opportunities based on self-initiative more attractive than those based on organisational support, which further contrasts the belief that CSR-related attributes are universally effective. Results contribute to the employer branding theory by demonstrating that applicants' social and personal identities determine the effectiveness of CSR and other, previously unexplored, symbolic and instrumental employer attributes. They also provide employers with directions for designing effective recruiting strategies across educational backgrounds and career preferences.